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Summary

CaptainArcher is talking with an alientrader named D'Marr about the possibility of buying spare parts. Saying he specializes in exotic goods, however D'Marr still helps by giving them coordinates where The Enterprise could find all the materials that she needs. There is a ship that crashed on a nearby planet. The only problem is that it is supposedly haunted.

Enterprise enters orbit of said planet, where the crew finds the ship as predicted. No lifesigns are detected and an away team is dispatched to recover some useful parts. On the planet, they experience some "ghosts" and soon discover that a whole colony has been living in a small oasis hidden behind a dampening field.

These Kantares were on their way home when they were attacked by unknown aliens and forced to crash land on that planet. They had been surviving since but were not able to get the ship flying again. They also say that no distress calls were sent to avoid giving away their position (the dampening field serving the same purpose). This happened about 3 years ago.

Trip Tucker begins to work on repairing the ship systems and fraternizes with Liana, the daughter of the ship's chief engineer, Ezral. For the rest of the Enterprise crew, things do not go so smoothly. They discover a number of inconsistencies in the story they have been told: the ship appears to have crashed some twenty-two years previously instead of three years, the oasis is not big enough to sustain the whole colony, and they don't seem to have suffered any attack. An escape pod is also found in orbit, and the body in it is actually that of Shallot, who appears to be alive and living on the planet.

T'Pol apparently also discovers something, but before she can report her discovery, she is captured by the colonists. A team returns to the planet to get some explanations, but the colonists begin to be aggressive, forcing Tucker to perform repairs and the rest of the team to go back to Enterprise.

A rescue team is sent on the planet to get T'Pol and Tucker back. Things get ugly, and people begin shooting at each other. When a phase pistol beam passes right through a colonist, the significance of the ghost story D'Marr told earlier becomes apparent.

Liana shares the secret of the colony with Tucker; everyone in the colony except Liana and her father are holograms, and he convinces her to deactivate them before anyone gets hurt. With no more lies needing to be told, Ezral then explains the real circumstances of the crash. They were caught in a plasma storm, and the ship being too severely damaged, they had to crash land on the nearby planet. The only problem was that Ezral left his station during the landing to prevent his daughter's death, causing the death of the rest of the crew by his negligence. After he realized they were stranded on a deserted planet, he re-created all the crew as holograms so that Liana would not have to grow up completely isolated.

Tucker agrees to assist in repairing the holographic system, but still says that Liana deserves more than to live her life alone with her father on that forgotten planet. Ezral says that he is happy there, but, he is finally convinced by Archer that what is best for him may not be the best for his daughter. In the end, Ezral decides to accept Archer's help, getting the required components from Enterprise to fix his ship.

Extended scenes

For this episode, there are two extended scenes that can be found on the ENT Season 1 DVD. A note preceding each scene states, "The color portion of the following was lifted from the show – the black & white portion was retained in the final version."

Oasis deleted scene 8

As in the aired version of the episode, Tucker and T'Pol explore the crashed ship, using flashlights to see in the darkness of the alien environment. When T'Pol becomes certain that she has just heard something, Tucker suspects she is imagining things due to her fear of the situation but the Vulcan insists that nothing frightens her. In the extended version of the scene, T'Pol continues the discussion by claiming that "fear is a primitive emotion". Certain that something must evoke that particular response in her, Tucker wonders whether T'Pol is scared by heights or spiders, to which she finally reveals that, when previously recalled from Enterprise by the High Command, she discovered the crew was preparing a "going-away" party and found the idea "somewhat frightening".

Oasis deleted scene 21

The aired section of this scene includes Tucker and T'Pol finding the "crew" of the crashed ship, several of whom are armed with hand weapons aimed at the Enterprise officers. The extended portion then progresses with T'Pol asking the people she sees before her whether the ship is theirs, to which they do not respond. She consequently takes out her communicator, provoking a curious look from Ezral, and activates the device, asking the alien group whether they can understand her. When they still do not react, Tucker nevertheless announces his suspicions that the group is surprised to see the visitors and probably think they are scavengers. After Tucker admits that their suspicions are correct but that he and T'Pol thought the ship had been abandoned except for ghosts, the armed members of the group lower their weapons.

The premise of this episode is very similar to the DS9 episode "Shadowplay". Rene Auberjonois saw the similarities (Odo and Jadzia Dax had played the roles played by the Enterprise crew in this episode) and told Scott Bakula that DS9 had done a similar episode. Auberjonois commented, "That was not really a putdown, but when you've done that many years of writing stories, there will be recurring themes." [1]

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